Tracking Illegal Fishing—From Space

Tracking Illegal Fishing—From Space

June 15, 2015 - To track commercial fishing activity around the world, SkyTruth, a small nonprofit based in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, has recently launched Global Fishing Watch in partnership with Google and Oceana. This prototype tool analyzes a satellite-collected feed of tracking data from ships' automatic identification systems—which vessels use to communicate their location to one another—to map movement over time and automatically determine which ships are engaged in fishing activity. Each vessel is pinpointed on a map outlining fishing laws around the globe. This map will be publicly available on theWeb, allowing anyone with an Internet connection to act as a watchdog and see when and where commercial fishing activity is occurring.

You
know for years we've been puzzling over the problem of showing people what's
happening in the environment out in the ocean because so much of the important
things that are happening to the ocean are happening--you know, way offshore
out of sight from land, or underneath the surface of the water.

Paul Woods, Chief Technology Officer, SkyTruth:

You
can’t see what's below the waves, and you
can see what's more than 10 miles offshore. Nobody ever see’s that.

John Amos:

I
think it's really important for people to realize that yeah the ocean is huge,
but it's not infinite.

Paul Woods:

The
Oceans are running out of fish. It’s
all the nations of the world. Commercial fishing vessels are taking too many
fish, they're competing with each other to catch declining fish stocks, so they’re working harder and harder and harder to catch fewer and
fewer fish. So in the end there wont be any fish.

John Amos:

Global
fishing watch is a partnership between SkyTruth, Oceana and Google, to take
all of the track-able commercial fishing activity in the ocean, around the
world, and put it on a map, on the Web for everybody to see. So part of what we
do at SkyTruth is just try to make the invisible visible. and we stumbled
across this technology called automatic identification system.

And
it's a ship to ship system of radio frequency broadcasts where vessels can tell
each other where they are, who they are, how big they are, and where they're
moving and how fast.

And
it turns out that these ship to ship broadcast can be intercepted by satellites
flying overhead a couple hundred miles up. Based on the way the fishing vessel
is moving, out in the ocean, we can tell when it's actually engaged in fishing
activity.

So as long as you’re actually broadcasting- we can construct a path that
your vessel has followed and put that on a map for everybody.

Paul Woods:

And
and so now you can tell based on when and where the fishing happened overlaid
with the map of what the rules are, you can see whether it was in a place that
was legal or not. So you know it starts from from a red it goes up to yellow and orange
and white. So, the intensity of it shows you how much fishing is happening there and then it’s just like you're in Google Earth or
Google Maps. Just like you'd expect, just zoom in, you move around and you see
where the fishing is and then you have a little time slider that will let you move through the years and look at how the fishing changed over time.

John Amos:

So
with global fishing watch right now, even though the amount of fishing
activities that were able to see and show people is kind of jaw-dropping … it’s really only the tip of the iceberg
at this point and just a glimpse at what the total commercial fishing picture
is.

Paul Woods:

We
enable thousands of watchdogs who are currently not--don’t have the tools to speak up. And that's exactly what
motivates me with SkyTruth. It’s taking the unseen world and making
it more visible to more people which inspires better management.

Tracking Illegal Fishing—From Space

June 15, 2015 - To track commercial fishing activity around the world, SkyTruth, a small nonprofit based in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, has recently launched Global Fishing Watch in partnership with Google and Oceana. This prototype tool analyzes a satellite-collected feed of tracking data from ships' automatic identification systems—which vessels use to communicate their location to one another—to map movement over time and automatically determine which ships are engaged in fishing activity. Each vessel is pinpointed on a map outlining fishing laws around the globe. This map will be publicly available on theWeb, allowing anyone with an Internet connection to act as a watchdog and see when and where commercial fishing activity is occurring.